offline search function for messages

[danntee]

Currently, when my device's network is temporarily unavailable or the server is undergoing maintenance, the search function on the Android client cannot be used. Can we add a feature in future versions that allows searching of local message records even when there is no internet connection?

[gnprice]

@danntee Thanks for the feedback!

This would be a large feature to add; currently all Zulip clients rely on the server for search, because the server has an index that provides efficient full-text search. A client also can only search the messages it has locally, which will typically be a small number of recent messages; so a lot of the use cases for searching message history wouldn't be possible to satisfy anyway.

I'll leave this issue thread open, though, to track the feature request, and we can see what other feedback we collect on it over time.